It’s way down there, at the bottom of the new bill, in brackets. The largest addition to the new draft of the Republican Better Care Reconciliation Act, released by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Thursday, is stashed away at the end of a 172-page series of amendments, Social Security Act references, and bits of tax code. The brackets around it indicate it’s not even fully part of the draft. But that new piece of language, based on language from Senator Ted Cruz, is a much more radical policy change than any of the other changes to private insurance in the bill.

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The proposed amendment would create a two-tiered system in the exchanges, and would likely leave sicker people paying higher premiums. It would do that with a provision that would allow insurers to provide alternative plans off the exchanges that don’t abide by rules regulating their value and benefits, so long as they offer regulated plans on the exchanges. The new tier of barebones plans would also be eligible to receive premium tax credits. The amendment would allocate an additional $70 billion from the Stability Fund from 2020 to 2026 to help pay for the rising costs in the old tier and stabilize them.

Stabilizing the insurance markets is key, because even without the Cruz amendment, the BCRA contains plenty potential disruptions to exchange markets. The first draft of the BCRA eliminated the individual mandate, increased the amount that older people could be charged for insurance, and allowed limited waivers for states to further relax rules on insurers, all of which would tend towards healthy people leaving exchanges and premiums likely rising steeply for sick people, people with pre-existing conditions, and older people.

For some people with high-cost conditions in waiver states, the last Congressional Budget Office score predicted that “premiums in the nongroup market could be very expensive for at least a short period of time.”

That’s why—starting with early drafts of the American Health Care Act in the House—Republicans have created funds to basically pay for all those increasing premiums for sicker people. Notably, as their plans have tended towards more and more relaxed rules for insurers, those funds have gotten larger. Each round of relaxation of insurance rules comes with more funding that is essentially earmarked for helping smooth distortions.

The Cruz amendment functions as a way to remove key safeguards against death spirals.

Cruz’s amendment is no different, and it creates even more distortions. Along with another new provision in the base BCRA allowing exchange consumers to receive tax credits for purchasing catastrophic coverage, the Cruz amendment would essentially create two entirely separate tiers of subsidized insurance. The lower tier would feature a collection of low-premium plans with either scarce benefits, high deductibles, or both.

The higher tier would feature the kinds of plans in exchanges now, although perhaps with higher deductibles, more cost-sharing and slightly fewer covered services on average than today. In the absence of a mandate especially, it seems rather obvious that healthy people with relatively low risk of serious conditions in the future would tend to either go without insurance or select the lower tier, and sicker people would choose the higher tier.

Thus, the Cruz amendment creates almost a textbook scenario of wide-scale adverse selection—whereby riskier and more expensive patients wind up concentrated in risk pools—and entirely undermines any tools for managing that adverse selection. Of course, the loss of a mandate threatens to do this as well, just by virtue of letting millions of healthier people leave exchanges entirely. But the Cruz plan elevates that risk by further splitting the risk pools of those who choose to remain insured, and providing even more of an incentive to leave robust exchange markets.

The likely result would be that the cost of ACA-compliant plans would skyrocket. The ACA-compliant plans would effectively become a high-risk pool, attracting enrollees when they need costly health benefits – such as maternity care, or drugs to treat cancer or HIV, or therapies to treat mental health and substance abuse disorders – and those with pre-existing conditions who are turned down by non-compliant plans or charged high premiums based on their health. By contrast, non-compliant plans would attract healthier consumers, at least as long as they didn’t need coverage for such benefits.

For people who make less than 350 percent of the federal poverty line and are eligible for premium tax credits under the BCRA, those credits would likely hide premium increases, since they can adjust to limit how much a household spends on insurance. But for people above that threshold, the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis finds that the real cost of insurance would make exchange plans more and more unaffordable or inaccessible. That goes doubly so for the 1.5 million in that group people with pre-existing conditions, since off-exchange plans would likely still bar people with those conditions from enrolling.

Even for people who stay on exchange plans and have tax credits, premiums will rise more and more as their pools get sicker and riskier. They might not bear the full brunt of those increases, but the federal budget certainly will. That’s where all that money set aside in the various drafts of Republican health bills comes in: Stability funds provide reinsurance and other backstops to help insurers pay for risky patients, thus maybe keeping insurers afloat and willing to offer plans on the exchanges. The new draft of the BCRA above the brackets adds an additional $70 billion to those funds in recognition of the magnitude of the issue.

The Cruz amendment doesn’t add another $70 billion on top of that, but rather uses the new money to help offset its own risk. As the Brookings Institute’s Matthew Fiedler told Talking Points Memo: “The Cruz amendment then redirects that same money to make payments to insurers designed to mitigate the problems that the Cruz amendment would create in the ACA-compliant market.” And it’s unclear if that’s nearly enough to make markets work and keep insurers from bolting.

So far, Cruz has defended his plan with the idea that there would be a single risk pool—i.e. all those healthy people on barebones plans and the sicker people on beefier plans would be rated together by insurers, which would allow healthy people to offset the risks of the sick. Pooling is next to impossible, though. The red tape for combining exchange and off-exchange risk pools together makes for an almost insurmountable obstacle, and Cruz’s own amendment adds another. It makes the new barebones plans ineligible for federal reinsurance, which would likely make them incompatible with pooling with exchange plans.

So what’s the point of Cruz’s amendment? The internal logic seems to be that deregulation and choice are good for the markets—except insurers are largely saying the amendment will be terrible for the markets. It might give people more “choices” and “freedom” to buy different plans, but that advantage only holds so long as insurers are willing to actually provide plans in both markets. Insurer retention is already one of the central problems under the ACA, and the Cruz amendment seems likely to worsen that. It’s unclear if the amendment will even create budgetary savings by paying credits for lower-premium skimpy plans, since the government will be on the hook for following distortions in the exchange markets or wide-scale adverse selection.

That wide-scale adverse selection will come. And with it comes the risk of death spirals, where sickening risk pools create ever-higher premiums. The Cruz amendment functions as a way to remove key safeguards against those death spirals. It meets few real policy goals, and would likely cause more of the market instability that the CBO has warned against. Luckily for Ted Cruz and conservative Senators rallying around his addition, this particular amendment and draft may not even receive a CBO review, so Americans might not even have a good look at its long-lasting effects until they have to sign up for coverage in 2020.

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Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

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What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest for 2017, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17. The Grand Prize Winner will receive $10,000 (USD), publication in National Geographic Magazine and a feature on National Geographic’s Instagram account. The folks at National Geographic were, once more, kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far for display here. The captions below were written by the individual photographers, and lightly edited for style.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

His delicate new song makes the problems of fame shockingly relatable.

If ever there were a time when the world could use more songs about the stresses of being rich and famous, the era of Drake and Taylor Swift 2.0 would not seem to be it. And yet even the most played-out topic can be made interesting again through talent and craftsmanship, as Chance the Rapper reminded America Monday night on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

The 24-year-old Chicagoan told Colbert, with whom he recently collaborated on the politically-charged opening medley for the Emmys, that the song he was about to premiere was written entirely in the last few days. On one hand, a quick turnaround might explain the spare sound and straightforward structure of the untitled track. But on the other, it’s mindbendingly impressive if the tune’s bracing poetry and melody wereindeed just tossed-off.